Former chairman of the Korea Racing Authority: Everyone should be able to enjoy the real fun of horseracing

April 15, 2019

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“Imagine that you owned a horse that, under your care, would thrive as a racehorse and win you wealth and glory. For many, this is without the very outer realms of possibility, far beyond what most could imagine. However! – it would serve you well to think more boldly. RacingLand is making this fantasy into a reality,”said JoongHo Ahn, RacingLand committee member and ex-chairman of the Korea Race Authority.

Horseracing is a traditional and glorious sport – persisting, in various forms, throughout every stage of human history. The modern professional horseracing industry originated in Britain; favoured by its royal family as a noble pursuit. On the premise of this historical and severely upper-class origin, traditional horseracing is fundamentally characterised as a sport with a notoriously high barrier for entry, as if it were a fast-moving river that cut off a continent that might have been inextricably linked from the rest of the world. Many horseracing enthusiasts without the fabulous wealth of the nobility lament this barrier, not least because of the damaging effects that horseracing elitism has had on the development of the modern industry.

And so, foreseeing the demise of the horseracing circuit upon the horizon, RacingLand was born. Its efforts to slow the effects of elitism upon the industry are crystallised through the power of blockchain technology. Through novel approaches to the problems arising as a result of horseracing elitism, RacingLand aims to lower the threshold of the horseracing industry, to allow horse-racing enthusiasts to participate more extensively in the horse-racing industry, to make professional horseracing more scientific and diversified, to achieve greater commercial development of the horceracing industry, and, as a result, to become an industrial bridge to connect the two sides of the strait, and link the old school of thought which emphasises the special and noble nature of the sport with the new school of thought which aspires for every enthusiast to be united with their steed.

New technologies can revolutionise any industry, of course, but they can also solve problems that traditional industries cannot. RacingLand, with the breakthrough of blockchain encryption token and smart contracts, makes the dream of horse ownership no longer unreachable. This is a change that the industry has never seen before, and marks the start of something special.

“To bring the fantasy of owing a real horse to reality is the first step.” JoongHo Ahn added, “we hope to create a platform where participants can enjoy the real joy with the integration of new technology to the equine industry.”

With the rapid development of 5G networks, wearable devices and the ever-present Internet of Things, humanity will be more and more closely linked, which, in RacingLand’s eyes, provides a perfect platform for horse owner to be more engaged. In the process of breeding and domesticating horses, for instance, wearable devices have been developed specially for horses which allow for health indices (such as heart rate, body temperature and blood pressure) to be monitored in real time through the Internet of things; that data will be packaged in a chained fashion and stored in the RacingLand blockchain.

Of course, the data stored in RacingLand’s coffers is not limited to the immediate physical condition of the horse. It will also record the bonuses, results and honours of every race a horse enters, for instance – irrevocably uploaded and recorded to the chain for the world to see. This provides a reliable basis for future horse eligibility and auction transactions, informing owners and buyers in a before-unprecedented level of detail. At the same time, this real data is analysed by an artificial intelligence algorithm, to provide the most effective training methods and competition schemes.